


a familiar dance that spoke of a practiced romance

by insatiablegaydesire



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Study, Domestic, Eddie's relationship with touch, Established Relationship, Fluff, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, M/M, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Self-Reflection, Touch, rated teen for very vague references to sex, v soft v domestic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23714449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insatiablegaydesire/pseuds/insatiablegaydesire
Summary: Eddie was a tactile person; he always had been. When the Losers were young, they were always touching, arms linked, legs crossed, one carrying another on their shoulders or back, skin on skin and the cotton fabrics of their clothes intermingling into a mess of sheets. In their clubhouse in the Barrens, Eddie never hesitated to jump into the hammock with Richie or lie with his head on Bev’s lap as she read the latest Wonder Woman comic aloud. His mother had hated seeing all those hands fumble within his own, called them dirty and damned, but he never stopped, never even thought to. Life without touch didn’t seem like a life at all. What would warm his body during the cold winters if not the touch of his friends?Eddie and touch; a character study of a boy who enjoyed it and a man who learned to let it back into his life.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 12
Kudos: 70





	a familiar dance that spoke of a practiced romance

Eddie was a tactile person; he always had been. When the Losers were young, they were always touching, arms linked, legs crossed, one carrying another on their shoulders or back, skin on skin and the cotton fabrics of their clothes intermingling into a mess of sheets. In their clubhouse in the Barrens, Eddie never hesitated to jump into the hammock with Richie or lie with his head on Bev’s lap as she read the latest Wonder Woman comic aloud. His mother had hated seeing all those hands fumble within his own, called them dirty and damned, but he never stopped, never even thought to. Life without touch didn’t seem like a life at all. What would warm his body during the cold winters if not the touch of his friends?

Once he left Derry, the memories of his friends began to fade, but his need for touch did not. His new city friends didn’t take well to it. New Yorkers stayed within their own, kept their limbs constantly pasted to their sides, marching soldiers in unison bustling down busy streets. Once, in his freshman year, Eddie was invited to go out with a group of guys from his World History lecture, only to be left behind at the bar when he tried to wrap his arm around one of their waists. The guy pushed him off, yelling at him to _get the fuck off me, what do you think I am, a-?_ And so he stopped reaching out to touch whenever the instinct came. These were supposedly his friends, and they didn’t enjoy his touch. When snow fell from the sky, he stuck his hands in his own pockets or held them to his mouth to blow warm, wet air into the palms. It wasn’t right, the ghost of a feeling he would chase forever, but at least it was something. At least he had the warmth from his own lungs.

Meeting Myra didn’t change this. She didn’t like to be touched much, even after their wedding night, as anticlimactic as it was, so his hands remained idle as they went about their days, passing each other by with more than a foot of space between them. But this time, he didn’t feel as if he were missing out. To tell the truth, he never did get the instinct to reach out when Myra drifted his way; he kept to his own, his hands clasped together, fingers interlocked sitting between his legs to satisfy the need of skin on skin. Sometimes, late at night, to the sound of Myra’s steady intakes of breath from the other side of the bed, he lifted up his shirt and dragged a light hand up his side, a comforting caress that made him crave more. The only one who would give him the touch he needed was Eddie himself, so he gave it in rations, knowing if he allowed himself it fully he’d never be able to stop.

But now, Eddie had Richie. Richie, with his wide palms that rested on Eddie’s hips when they kissed, and his ankles that crossed with his own in their bed as they slept, and his chin which tucked itself on the top of Eddie’s shoulder when they sat together on the couch to watch Netflix. Much like in childhood, Richie and Eddie spent most of their time intertwined. 

When they washed dishes together, Eddie with his hands under the water and Richie’s dry, their elbows brushed, their knees held a conversation below the counter, knocking and fumbling until the movements became synchronous, a repeating rhythm that faded to background music, noticeable but unintelligible. Above the counter, Richie and Eddie continued their work, holding a conversation of their own. Richie joked and stuck his own hand under the faucet to mirror Eddie’s, threw a fistful of bubbles toward Eddie’s cheek; Eddie ducked and cursed. It was a dance, like everything they did. Eddie told Richie to stick the towel in his mouth; Richie did, a muffled song falling through the holes of the cloth. Eddie screamed laughter; Richie took the towel out and joined in. Eddie let it fall to the floor, to be forgotten until the next morning, when he’d feel his foot slide across it and almost send him plummeting onto the wood. Back and forth, they timed their steps, a familiar dance that spoke of a practiced romance. 

“If I asked you to jump off a bridge, would you?” Eddie asked.

“Yes,” Richie replied. “As long as I’m safe and I get to kiss you afterwards.”

It amazed Eddie, what Richie allowed him to do. He wasn’t used to such freedom, or such power. In the palm of his hand, he held the reins to Richie himself. He could guide him down a path of hurt, make him walk across glass, hold him beneath the water’s surface and feel that touch reach for him, wild and desperate.

But Eddie wasn’t that kind of man; he never had been. He was the kind of boy who enjoyed hugs with his friends, and holding hands as they walked, the kind of boy who held on too tight but never enough to actually hurt.

Richie had already been through a lifetime of hurt; so Eddie took him by the back of the neck and led him some place soft. 

When Eddie and Richie were alone, nothing could touch them besides each other. The rest of the world faded away as they got lost in each other’s hands, the music of each other’s breaths, following that dance once more until it left them gasping and glorified. As the world came back into focus once more, the sounds of the city trickling in to join the echoing of their own hearts, they reached out to one another for comfort. The world was loud, but their touch softened it. 

Sometimes, the scream of it came for Richie and left him paralyzed. Eddie couldn’t cure the hurt, couldn’t pry it from Richie’s soul and burn it alive, watch as it shriveled and shook, but he had his hand in Richie’s and a lap for his head. He could coax out the hurt slowly with the gentle crook of his fingers in Richie’s hair as he slept. Outside, the world continued on. Inside, Eddie led a one-man dance, determined to finish the song and for his partner to return.

Eventually, like always, he did.

When they were forced to separate, the absence of touch plagued them both. Richie would fly out to New York for a stint on SNL, Eddie left behind because of his boss’s demands. Or he would go on tour, dancing his way through the country alone while Eddie stayed in LA, filing papers and using his touch to type away in Microsoft Excel. 

Soon after their third anniversary, Eddie found a place downtown, where the smoke and heat congregated with the people, shook hands with their lungs. He brought Richie with him, presented him to the artist. In a grungy shop in downtown LA, Eddie got Richie’s thumbprint tattooed on his right hip, where it would stay forever, long past the day that he died and his body only touched the plush velvet of a coffin, then the damp darkness of dirt. Only when his skin began to decay would Richie’s touch leave him. Until then, it was immortalized in black ink, deep beneath his skin.

Afterwards, whenever Richie went on tour, and Eddie would go weeks without his hands on his body, he’d press his own thumb to the print and hold it there, feel the ghost echo of Richie’s touch from thousands of miles away. It wasn’t even close to the original, but it felt like something, and something was always better than nothing. Even the dull ache of a faint warmth was better than the chilling touch of empty air.

But then Richie would return to him, and the world would fall quiet once more, and Eddie’s skin would light a fire beneath it, sunlight flowing through his veins. Richie touched him again, and nothing else mattered.

It brought him back to his childhood, the summers he spent not as one person, but as seven at once. Here, with Richie, they were two; but back in Derry, they had been a group, a troupe of dancers, moving to a pre-choreographed routine, legs and arms and hands and feet and heads, all meeting in the middle and conversing in skins. 

Sometimes, at night, he could feel the others reaching out. Stan’s bony knuckles knocking with his own; Bev’s hand tugging him forward and tripping his feet; Mike’s strong arms lifting him to safety, out of It’s claws; Bill’s feathery hair tickling his leg; Ben’s face pressed against his shoulder. He felt them all within him, bundled into that spot high up in his chest, where he used to feel an asthmatic stitch. 

Eddie had always loved touch, loved to dole it out or to receive. Others’ touch wasn’t always kind to him; he had a line of thick scar tissue down his sternum to prove it. But the hands of those six had never hurt. He was right before; life without touch wasn’t a life at all. So he vowed to touch as much as he could, as much as he was allowed, until his hands rose no more, weighed down by the weight of a life well lived. But even then, the dance would go on. It was ingrained in Eddie’s memory, immortalized in his skin. Touch would never leave him again. If Eddie had to dig his way out of his own grave, through the wood and the dirt, so be it. For he had that power now, given to him by Richie in the slide of their hands, the meeting of their knees, and he was never letting go. 

Richie lay on his side on the bed, an arm’s length away. Eddie reached out, slow and gentle, and touched.


End file.
